Directives

A <cookie-name> can be any US-ASCII characters except control characters (CTLs), spaces, or tabs. It also must not contain a separator character like the following: ( ) < > @ , ; : \ " / [ ] ? = { }.

A <cookie-value> can optionally be set in double quotes and any US-ASCII characters excluding CTLs, whitespace, double quotes, comma, semicolon, and backslash are allowed. Encoding: Many implementations perform URL encoding on cookie values, however it is not required per the RFC specification. It does help satisfying the requirements about which characters are allowed for <cookie-value> though.

__Secure- prefix: Cookies with a name starting with __Secure- (dash is part of the prefix) must be set with the secure flag and must be from a secure page (HTTPS).

__Host- prefix: Cookies with a name starting with __Host- must be set with the secure flag, must be from a secure page (HTTPS), must not have a domain specified (and therefore aren't sent to subdomains) and the path must be "/".

Expires=<date> Optional

The maximum lifetime of the cookie as an HTTP-date timestamp. See Date for the detailed format. If not specified, the cookie will have the lifetime of a session cookie. A session is finished when the client is shut down meaning that session cookies will get removed at that point. However, many web browsers have a feature called session restore that will save all your tabs and have them come back next time you use the browser. Cookies will also be present and it's like you had never actually closed the browser.

When an expiry date is set, the time and date set is relative to the client the cookie is being set on, not the server.

Max-Age=<number> Optional

Number of seconds until the cookie expires. A zero or negative number will expire the cookie immediately. Older browsers (ie6, ie7, and ie8) do not support max-age. For other browsers, if both (Expires and Max-Age) are set, Max-Age will have precedence.

Domain=<domain-value> Optional

Specifies those hosts to which the cookie will be sent. If not specified, defaults to the host portion of the current document location (but not including subdomains). Contrary to earlier specifications, leading dots in domain names are ignored. If a domain is specified, subdomains are always included.

Path=<path-value> Optional

Indicates a URL path that must exist in the requested resource before sending the Cookie header. The %x2F ("/") character is interpreted as a directory separator and sub directories will be matched as well (e.g. path=/docs, "/docs", "/docs/Web/", or "/docs/Web/HTTP" will all be matched).

Secure Optional

A secure cookie will only be sent to the server when a request is made using SSL and the HTTPS protocol. However, confidential or sensitive information should never be stored or transmitted in HTTP Cookies as the entire mechanism is inherently insecure and this doesn't mean that any information is encrypted, for example.

Invalid domains

A cookie belonging to a domain that does not include the origin server should be rejected by the user agent. The following cookie will be rejected if it was set by a server hosted on originalcompany.com.

Cookie prefixes

Cookies names with the prefixes __Secure- and __Host- can be used only if they are set with the secure directive from a secure (HTTPS) origin. In addition, cookies with the __Host- prefix must have a path of "/" (the entire host) and must not have a domain attribute. For clients that don't implement cookie prefixes, you cannot count on having these additional assurances and the cookies will always be accepted.